Kids Still Find It Easy to Buy Flavored Vapes Online

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by HealthDay.

If you think that federal restrictions on the sale of tobacco products make it nearly impossible for your teen to buy vapes online, new research suggests you’re mistaken.

In 2020, the Preventing Online Sales of E-Cigarettes to Children Act banned e-cigarettes and vaping products from being shipped through the U.S. Postal Service and introduced an ID scan requirement to accept deliveries of such items. But while sales of flavored tobacco products have been restricted in eight states and nearly 400 cities or counties, those regulations don’t fully cover online shopping, researchers report.

For the study, published Monday in the journal JAMA Network Open, researchers looked at attempts to buy flavored nicotine vaping products from 78 websites and have them delivered to private homes.

Among 105 deliveries, delivery personnel scanned the receiver’s ID only one time. Most of the products (78%) were delivered with no delivery interaction, 16% spoke with delivery personnel with no ID check and only 5.7% had their ID checked but not scanned.

“These results demonstrated pervasive non-adherence to age verification, shipping and flavored tobacco restrictions among online tobacco retailers,” the researchers wrote in their study. “Jurisdictions should consider whether to permit online tobacco sales and, if permitted, ensure that retail policies such as flavor restrictions unambiguously cover online sales.”

In 2019, Congress raised the legal purchasing age for tobacco products from 18 to 21, including a requirement for retailers to verify photo ID.

However, “age-gating technology on these websites don’t actually work,” Thomas Carr, director of national policy for the American Lung Association, told CNN. “People will not tell the truth when they enter their age, and it’s remarkably easy for kids to get tobacco products mailed to them. At brick-and-mortar stores, you have a clerk who could check ID and actually look at the person, which you can’t do online.”

Source: HealthDay
https://www.healthday.com/health-news/child-health/kids-still-find-it-easy-to-buy-flavored-vapes-online